While working as a banker almost 20 years ago we got baseball bats as deal gifts. The client was in my boss’ office and saw one and said he wanted one so we did it. Much cooler than a lucite. I have it buried in a closet somewhere - the deal was absolutely miserable for me so not something I am eager to remember.
In the 80s my aunt worked for Doubleday books, and Doubleday owned the Mets, so she got us really good seats to a game at Shea. It was bat day and they were decent sized bats. Someone on the Mets (I want to say Dave Kingman) hit a home run and people in the upper deck started throwing bats to celebrate so our great seats turned out to be the worst location possible.
Spontaneous: OK. Planned: not ok.
I once created some pandemonium at my very large employer...we'd just concluded a huge product launch in conjunction with another large corporate location, and the twit in charge of celebrating the occasion decided to make up some very fancy shirts...and of course then the question becomes, who gets a shirt and who doesn't?
I got wind of the fact they were running low on shirts the day of the Big Celebration, so I snuck into a conference room (where there'd be no called ID) and called the twit in charge, mumbling as best I could, so my voice would neither be recognized nor clearly understood on his voicemail...I mumbled out Hey, This is Matt Kozinski, my team and I will be stopping by later for our shirts! Bye!
Chaos ensued, Twit in Charge trying to figure out how to spell this mumbled Kozinski, and ascertain who he is, how important, and how big is his team... I milked the chaos until I was pretty sure the Twit in Charge might have a seizure...great fun (for me and my co-conspirators, anyway). Yeah, those things were a huge pain in the butt.
^ the post script to all this, driven by the fact that EVERYONE was so sick of hearing about Twit Man's celebratory shirts that our department made up our own shirts (and paid for them ourselves) which stated in big letters: We Buy Our Own Shirts.
Ha, I (preliminarily) reserved cars from Hertz for my Fall Duke football visits, and a one day weekend rental is more than $200! I'd heard about this, Hertz is technically bankrupt, of course nearly all their business dried up a year ago, they sold off cars, now evidently they can't rebuild the fleet fast enough...friends going to Colorado soon still can't even find a car at any price. I suspect supply will gradually increase, but the supply of cars has that hideous bottleneck caused by the chip shortage, so who knows when things approach normal...
Car rentals vary wildly by location, day of the week, and supply. Sometimes you can't smell a car for a day for less than $200. Sometimes with enough notice you can rent one for less than $25/day.
I once flew out to Seattle to visit my sister. If I packaged my flight with a car rental, it actually saved me about $150.
I'll never understand the logarithms behind rental car pricing and airline pricing.
Sage Grouse
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'When I got on the bus for my first road game at Duke, I saw that every player was carrying textbooks or laptops. I coached in the SEC for 25 years, and I had never seen that before, not even once.' - David Cutcliffe to Duke alumni in Washington, DC, June 2013
I'm aware of that, Mtn, but have you tried to book one recently? They are really hard to find at even a moderate rate...often the supply/demand thing is pretty predictable (I've learned to avoid the week when the NC Furniture Show is going on)..
https://www.businessinsider.com/rent...hortage-2021-4
As this article notes, it's a perfect storm of a VERY sharp increase in demand coupled with a severe new car shortage caused by semiconductor woes...it's going to be some time before the imbalance is corrected.
While I booked my upcoming NC rantals (In Sept, Oct and Nov) for $200+ per day, I'm guessing I can cancel and rebook at much lower rates within a few months.
Keep in mind, these are rentals for Saturday only at RDU...in normal times, all the car rental places have a huge overabundance of cars on weekends because they're geared to serve the monday-friday corporate crowd. But not now.